"This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible
approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even
now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all
machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor
lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but
his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of
mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more
machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man
should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become
extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even
these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man's very soul
is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he
thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have
wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a _sine qua non_
for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the
complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we
should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest
they should tyrannise over us even more completely.
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